[Umashankar Joshi Memorial Lecture: 5 October 2013]

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER

and
Indian Literature:

K.Satchidanandan

Vaikom Mohammed Basheer (1908-1994) belongs firmly to what I like to call the democratic
tradition in Indian literature, a living tradition that can be traced back to the Indian tribal
lore including the Vedas and the folktales and fables collected in Somdeva’s Panchatantra
and Kathasaritsagara, Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha, Kshemendra’s Brihatkathamanjari, the Vasudeva
Hindi and the Jatakas. This tradition was further enriched by the epics, especially Ramayana
and Mahabharata that combined several legends from the oral tradition and are found in
hundreds of oral, performed and written versions across the nation that interpret the
tales from different perspectives of class, race and gender and with different implications
testifying to the richness and diversity of Indian popular imagination and continue to
produce new textual versions, including dalit, feminist and other radical interpretations and
adaptations even today. Sanskrit literature too, while confined mostly to courts, produced
a parallel stream of democratic literature that had poets like Yogeswara and playwrights
like Soodraka whose works are woven around the day-to-day lives of common folk. It also
gave rise to opposing concepts of poetry and poetics, including theories of reading like
dhwani and anumana that privileged the reader. The Sangam literature of Tamil and the
Buddhist and Jain literatures found in Pali, Prakrit and Sanskrit also dealt with the suffering
of common people and their domestic and public lives and often upheld egalitarian values
and democratic messages. The Tamil literature of the period also produced a new eco-
poetics based on various terrains or tinais and the moods and situations associated with
them. The Bhakti and Sufi literatures gave a firm footing to this democratic tradition by
interrogating power in its political and economic manifestations and the hierarchies based
on caste, creed, language and priesthood, and the many superstitions and customs that
had kept the people enslaved in various ways. This tradition, essentially of craftsmen,
women and religious and ethnic minorities, refused to privilege Brahmin ideology, imperial
hegemony and Sanskrit language, strengthened people’s tongues, established new genres
of writing, music and dance and interpreted religious discourse from egalitarian and
democratic points of view, thus often subverting the status-quoist hermeneutics that

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 1

had sustained upper class and upper caste monopolies in society. The multilingual and
subaltern tradition of Indian literature was recreated and reinforced by these movements
that initiated a humanist dialogue that cut across the man -made boundaries of region,
caste and religion. The anti-colonial and reform-oriented literature of the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth century that gave rise to new prose genres like the novel and
the short story and created new forms of poetry and drama had drawn its nourishment
from the values of the Bhakti-Sufi movements as is clear from a reading of its greatest
poets like Tagore, Nazrul Islam, Subramania Bharati or Kumaran Asan.

Fiction in India, born out of our colonial encounter, had its roots in our own narrative
tradition and has been since its origins, to follow the Homi Bhabha paradigm, an attempt
to narrate the Indian nation in all its plural complexity. The novels, and to a lesser extent
the short stories, written before and after Independence reveal to us the various ways in
which the Indian nation was imagined and re-imagined from diverse locations in the society
and from various positions in history. Together they can be said to constitute an unofficial
history of the subcontinent that documents the people’s perceptions of the struggles
and the successes, the dilemmas and the failures of the nation ,at times at the level of the
community and at times of the family and most often at both these at the same time. It
was often done at the micro-level of the local and the regional or from the points of view
of the religious and ethnic minorities or of women , thus bringing in different concepts
of the nation and various ways of conjuring it into being. This had already begun with the
early novelists like Rajanikanta Bordoloi, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,K S Venkataramani
,Govardhanram Tripathi, C V Raman Pillai, O Chandu Menon, Hari Narayan Apte, Fakir
Mohan Senapati, Bhai Vir Singh, Vedanayagam Pillai, Vishvanatha Satyanarayana, Ratannath
Sarshar and Mirza Muhmmad Hadi ‘Ruswa’, who, through their regional or historical
novels, had begun to trace the roots of our nationhood. The next generation took this
exploration further. We find greater maturity and realism in novelists like Bibhuti Bhushan
Bandopadhyay, Tarashankar Banerjee, Manik Banerjee, Gopinath Mohanty, Syed Abdul
Malik, Birendrakumar Bhattacharya, Jhaverchand Meghani, Premchand, Phanishwar Nath
Renu, Jainendrakumar, Yashpal, L S Ramamirtham, D Jayakantan, Thakazhi Sivasankara
Pillai,Sane Guruji, Shivarama Karanth, Gurdial Singh, KAAbbas, Krishen Chander, Ismat
Chughtai, R. S. Bedi, Qurratul-ain-Hyder and others. They do not exactly belong to the
same generation in chronological terms nor did they employ the same narrative strategies
and techniques; but they did share a common social spirit and moral commitment. This is
where Basheer too properly belonged in spirit.

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 2

We may recall that unlike in Europe where fiction was made possible by the autonomous
sensibility of an individuated consciousness that came into being in the 18th and 19th
centuries, such a state of individuation had not been achieved in India when the novel
and the short story were made available as a ready-made form. So the Indian fiction
writers were able to put into productive use the still living native story-telling traditions as
well as the epic narrative modes. But our paradigmatic early novels like Bankim Chandra’s
Anandamath, Govardhanram Tripathi’s Saraswatichandra or O ChanduMenon’s Indulekha
were constituted to serve the emerging middle-class nationalistic ideology. This led to
many exclusions and distortions that came to be interrogated by writers like Premchand
and others whose social realist works criticize the mainstream nationalism with its
pronounced upper class-upper caste bias. Their attempt to construct an alternative
national consciousness was also prompted by a predatory element in nationalist ideology
that had begun to manifest itself in Germany and Italy in the form of Nazi and Fascist
practices of exclusion, othering, distorted interpretation of history, racial chauvinism,
atavistic regression, cult of death, suppression of minorities, fear of difference and of
genuine equality , sectarian manipulation of myths and archetypes , a negative and
insular definition of the nation and planned genocide.The Hindu Mahasabha and the
Rashtreeya Swayamsevak Sangh had also begun to exhibit these tendencies that would
grow to fatal proportions in indepenedent India. Ambedkar’s impact was one factor that
made Premchand seek alternate locations for narrating the nation, though now we know
that there were dalit narratives in the nineteenth century like Saraswteevijayam by Pothery
Kunhambu in Malayalam that looked at society and history from a totally different point
of view. The other fiction writers I had named earlier also tried to look at the gaps and
silences in the status- quoist definition of the nation.

The need to renegotiate the nation was obvious to the generation to which Basheer
belonged .They knew by instinct and experience – rather than by theoretical and
conceptual understanding- that people have their different and specific ways of belonging
to the nation through religion, culture, language etc and only a many-layered identity
can produce inclusive world views that can sustain a pluralistic society. The partition
of India, so movingly narrated in Yashpal’s Jhootta Sach, Qurratul-ain-Hyder’s Aag ka
Dariya Rahi Masoom Reza’s Aadha Gaon, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga,Opar Ganga ,
Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Arjun, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas,
Krishna Baldev Vaid’s Guzara Hua Zamana,Abdullah Hussain’s Udap Naslein, Khadija
Dastoor’s Angan, Intizar Husain’s Basti,Bapsi Sidwa’s Ice –Candy Man,Mukul Kesavan’s

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 3

Looking through Glass or the shorter narratives of Manto-like his famous ‘ Toba Tek Singh’-
or many works by Qudrat Ullah Shahab, Krishen Chander, K. A. Abbas, Ramlal, R. S.
Bedi, Syed Mohammed Ashraf, Mohan Rakesh and Bimal Mitra, proved their worst fears
true. No doubt novelists like Satinath Bhaduri (Dhonrai Charit Manas) , Mahaswetadevi
(Douloti ,Hazar Chaurasi ki Ma, Sthanadayini) Thakazhi (Thottiyude Makan, Kayar), Anand
(Aalkkoottam, Marubhoomikal Undavunnathu) and O. V. Vijayan (Dharmapuranam) have
truthfully recorded the disillusionment that followed independence, not to speak of
the Dalit novels and autobiographies of Laxman Gaikwad (Uchalya), Laxman Mane
(Upara),Sharan Kumar Limbale (Akkar Mashi,), Joseph Macwan (Angaliyat), Dalpat
Chauhan (Malak), Harish Manglam (Chaowky,Tirad), Mohan Parmar (Priyatama), Devanoor
Mahadeva (Kusuma Bale), Siddalingaiah (Ooru Keri), Bama (Karukku ,Sangati) and others.
Basheer looked at life with detachment and while representing the life of the Muslim
minority in Kerala and speaking from the outskirts of mainstream historiography also
succeeded in communicating the universal values of compassion, forgiving, tolerance
and love, a feat that Manto had established with the same eclat and elan. Basheer often
calls himself ‘the humble historian’( vineetha charitrakaran) and this figure of the historian
is implicit in his early stories that deal with the issues of freedom and the nation as well
as in his later narratives of domesticity , though here it often assumes the dimensions of
parody and mock history. He also went beyond the rigidities of ‘social realism’. One can
very well trace the beginnings of Modernism in Malayalam literature to Basheer and also
see elements of what has come to be called the ‘post-Modern’ in his narrative strategies,
especially the meta-narrative mode and the parodic approach to history that one may find
in a Samuel Beckett, Robbe -Grillet or Salman Rushdie.

Vaikom Mohammed Basheer was one of those rare artists who love the world with
all its imperfections rather than one of those who go on trying to change it since they
can love only a perfect world. It was this understanding of evil as an organic part of
creation and the identification with the outcastes, even those the world considers clowns,
idiots, cheats and villains whom his magic wand converted into lovable human beings
that helped Basheer redraw the map of Malayalam fiction many decades ago. He once
said, “I have been suckled by the women of all castes” and “I have made love to women
of every caste”. This experience told him that the human body is alike whatever the
caste or religious marks it wore. Here he was one with Sree Narayana Guru, that great

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 4

teacher of Kerala society, who had declared that there is only one caste, one religion
and one God and all human beings are born in the same way. Kumaran Asan, the great
poet and Guru’s disciple also had asked rather frankly, in a narrative context, “Is the
body of the chandal woman sterile to Brahmin’s seed?” Basheer used to say he was never
sure about the Malayalam alphabet; this apparent inadequacy compelled him to invent an
idiom that is closest to the everyday life of the Malayalees that revolutionised the art of
story-telling in the language. He could make his fictional world possible only by radically
altering the status-quoist vocabulary. Ordinary words picked up from the streets and the
inner courtyards of Malabar homes gained a new vibrancy and artistic aura when Basheer
employed them in his fresh narrative contexts. He used to say, “I am the story; what I
write is language”, “I am an artist” or more philosophically, “I am the flower, I am also
the garden”. His seemingly artless manner had behind it an unarticulated yet profound
theory about the use of language in contemporary fiction that taught different lessons to
future writers .While the detached humour in O. V. Vijayan, V.K.N., M. P. Narayana Pillai
and Paul Zacharia belong to Basheer’s lineage, the stylistic simplicity and lyrical quality
of Madhavikkutty(Kamala Das), M.T. Vasudevan Nair and M.Mukundan -writers very
different from Basheer - can also be traced to the same unique narrative heritage.

Of the many stories Basheer told, his own, as told in his autobiography, Ormayude Arakal
(The Chambers of Memory) is perhaps the most exciting. Trained in Arabic at home by a
musaliyar, he had learnt his Quran by eight. Then he studied Malayalam and English, and
read his first story books from a friend, one Potti, that might have first stirred in him the
desire to tell stories. The names of Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of the freedom
struggle excited the young boy. Basheer has given an account of his literally touching
Gandhiji during the Mahatma’s visit to his land for the historical Vaikom Satyagraha in
March, 1924 demanding, for the so-called ‘lower castes’, the right of enry into the temple.
The call of freedom took Basheer to Malabar, the centre of the nationalist activities in
Kerala.He joined the Al-Amin newspaper run by the patriot, Muhammad Abdu Rahman.
Basheer participated in the salt satyagraha on the Calicut beach that landed him in jail.
Now he began to feel Gandhi’s peaceful ways would not earn freedom for India; he was
fascinated by Bhagat Singh and his comrades and moved over to Ujjeevanam (Rejuvenation)
that had now turned from a Congress journal into the mouthpiece of the armed struggle
against the colonisers. Basheer had to go underground to evade arrest .That was the
beginning of seven years of wanderings in a variety of disguises: a Hindu mendicant, a
palmist, a magician’s assistant, an astrologer, a private tutor, a tea shop owner. He also

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 5

went to meet V. Shantaram in Pune in an outlandish outfit hoping to join the film industry.
Shantaram asked him to learn Marathi and come back. Before he could learn Marathi, a
certain Gajanan, impressed by his language skills, employed him as a tutor; but asked to
teach Mathematics, Basheer had no choice but to leave for Bombay where he became a
physician’s assistant in Kamatipura, the haunt of prostitutes, eunuchs and thieves. Next
he ran a night school in Bhindi bazaar teaching basic English. It was then the sea called
him and he found himself sailing as a khalasi on SSRizvani carrying Haj pilgrims to Jedda
via the Red Sea.On the way back he landed in what are now parts of Pakistan .He served
in a hotel in Karachi and then as proof reader’s copy holder in the Civil and Military Gazette
. Basheer had also a pilgrim in him; he visited several holy places of Hindus, Muslims
and Christians during his wanderings that made him truly secular: He lived among Hindu
sanyasins and Sufis while in North India to discover, in his own words, “aham brahmasmihi”
and “anal haq” pointed to the same Truth.
.
Ajmer, Peshawar, Kashmir, Kolkata : the vagrant’s travels ended at Ernakulam in Kerala
where he became an agent of sports goods for a firm in Sialkot. The family had gone
bankrupt by now as his father’s timber business had declined. An accident saw Basheer
deprived of his job too; on recovery he began writing stories for a paper called Jayakesari.His
first story Ente Thankam (My Thankam/darling) was typical: it had a dark-complexioned
hunchback as its heroine. He also wrote patriotic essays in Rajyabhimani (The Patriot)
besides indignant articles and satirical narratives against the Dewan of Travancore. Still
unsatisfied, he launched a weekly, Pauranadam (The Citizens’ Voice), to vent his ire against
the system. Again the police was after his blood; he went underground along with K.C.
George, a Communist leader. By now he had befriended some major writers of the period,
Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, SKPottekkat,Uroob, Joseph Mundassery and Changampuzha
Krishna Pillai among them. Finally he surrendered to the police on the suggestion of a
friendly police officer. The experiences in the lock up at Kollam gave him plenty to write
about. His Premalekhanam (Love-letter), a love story in the lighter vein, was a response
to the requests of his fellow prisoners, bored to death reading the Ramayana and the
Bible umpteen times. It deals with the love of Kesavan Nair and Saramma. The smart
young woman pretends to reaject the man’s advances though she is yearning to escape
the torments at home in the hands of her father and step- mother. She is sad that all
the young men who seek her hand demand heavy dowry. They discuss all the difficulties
their marriage will engender: even naming the child will be a problem as he will have no
religion. But Kesavan Nair has a solution, they will not give him either Christian or Hindu

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 6

names, he will be called ‘Akasamittai’, the Sweet from the Sky. Finally when the lover
invites her to go with him to the new place where he has found a better job, she sounds
elusive in her answer; but she leaves a letter of farewell at home and waits for him at the
railway station and they flee the place together. Kesavan Nair is thrilled to learn that she
had kept the first love-letter he had given her like a treasure though at that time she had
thrown it to the floor. Mathilukal (The Walls), an intense narrative of love and desire was
another product of this jail life.

After a stint in Madras with the Jayakeralam Weekly, he came back to Ernakulam to run the
‘Circle Book House’ later renamed ‘Basheer’s Book Stall’ and to write a popular column
for the cartoon magazine,Narmada. He had established his fame as a novelist already
with Balyakalasakhi (The Childhood Friend), a poignant story of childhood love that had
won praise from critics like M.P.Paul. Then followed a break of six years caused by ‘acute
insanity’ to use Basheer’s own phrase. Pathummayude Adu (Pathumma’s Goat) was written
in 1959 while he was still under treatment for his nervous breakdown. He now found
an understanding partner in Fatima Bi, ‘Fabi’ to him, shifted to Beypore where he lived,
earning the affectionate nick-name ‘Beypore Sultan’ until his demise at the age of 86 in
1994. He wrote little in the last three decades of his life; he would sit sipping ‘sulaimani’
under the shade of his pet mango stein tree, listen to ghazals and keep talking to the
‘pilgrims’ who found this frail ‘icon’ easier to handle than the restless full man in his
creative frenzy and wrote endlessly about their trip to meet him .

M. N. Vijayan, a major Malayalam critic, has pointed out that in Basheer there seems to
be no rift between the man and the writer. He often said that he became a writer only
because he lacked the training required to be a cook, a magician, a coconut-palm climber,
a pick-pocket or a journalist. Basheer’s fictional world is almost indistinguishable from
the factual world in which he lived : an autobiographical subtext is always inherent in
his fictional discourse. The author himself has traced Anuragathinte Dinangal (The Days
of Intimacy)to the diary he had kept of a Hindu girl’s love for him frustrated by the
objection from her parents and Basheer’s refusal to hurt them, Balykalasakhi to a real
childhood friendship, Pathummayude Adu to people and incidents at home and around,
and Mathilukal to an experience in the prison. His works are autobiographical not merely
because they recount real episodes from his life, but are the honest records of the turmoil

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 7

of his mind ever beset with conflicts that he refused to yield to. Outwardly most of his
stories deal with the lives of Kerala Muslims, but it will be a grave mistake to reduce
Basheer’s fiction to its ethnic content. At the deeper level, they are tales of men and
women everywhere, trapped in the ironic irrationality of the human condition. That is
why even the English translations of Basheer’s stories done by various translators from
Ronald Asher to V. Abdulla, while retaining little of their dialectal poetry, still manage to
capture their ultimate human appeal. Asher, the Edinburgh scholar and the first translator
of Basheer’s novels, himself has spoken about the structural and stylistic challenges posed
to the translators by Basheer’s minimalist narratives -which the author used to revise and
polish even after publishing them- with their quaint humour, expressive use of the spoken
language, understatement and suggestiveness. He also used a lot of Arab words that have
been naturalised in Malayalam like haj, halal ,halqat, thauba ,quaiamat, iblis etc that Asher
decided to retain as they were. He also had problems with onomatopoeic words that
Basheer created, like nhulu-nhulu, jagajaga, peppappe, huttini halitta lithappo etc., not to speak of
the innumerable names of trees and birds and beasts that went into Basheer’s landscape.

Basheer was a contemporary of well-known fiction writers in Malayalam like Karur

Nilakanta Pillai (1858-1975),Kesava Dev(1904-83), Ponkunnam Varki(1908-2007),
Lalitambika Antarjanam(1909-87), Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai(1912-1999), S. K. Pottekkat
(1913-82) and P. C. Kuttikrishnan ‘Uroob’(1915-79). He shares with these writers a certain
social conjuncture and consciousness; he also received the impact of the Progressive
Literary Movement or ‘Jeevatsahityam’ that had begun in Malayalam in the 1930s.Dev, Varki
and Thakazhi imaginatively recorded their vicarious experience of the sordidness penury
caused; but to Basheer poverty was a real and personal experience; yet he wrote about it with
considerable detachment and objectivity , without any self-pity. Like SKPottekkat, Basheer
too was widely travelled; but while Pottekkat wrote interesting travelogues, Basheer found
in travels opportunities for his stories. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai was perhaps a better
surveyor of social reality and a more analytical student of the history of communities; but
Basheer far excels him as a stylist who insisted on the propriety of each word and chiselled
his sentences to perfection- a quality one notices in some later writers like O.V. Vijayan,
Zachria and N.S.Madhavan and in some stories by their younger contemporaries like V.
R Sudheesh, Subhash Chandran , Sitara and Santosh Echikkanam. Basheer’s language is
not ‘literary’ if ‘literary’ means deliberately sophisticated and packed with Sanskrit words;
it is not ‘philosophical’ if ‘philosophical’ means filled with strained thoughts and ideas and
references, as exemplified by some writers celebrated as ‘philosophical’; but it is precisely

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 8

by being ‘non-literary’-easy, natural and deceptively simple- that Basheer distinguishes
himself from ordinary writers who strain after effects even while saying the most trivial
things. It is by appearing ‘non-philosophical’ that Basheer achieves a visionary quality
that is inaccesible to those who pack their fiction with borrowed or inane ideas. Basheer’s
optimism comes from a robust acceptance of tragedy, and not from the avoidance of
confrontation with the embarrassing contradictions of existence. He was avant-garde in
the true sense for, what he challenged was not just certain literary conventions, but the
institution of ‘Literature’ itself. He showed us how card-sharpers, prostitutes, pickpockets,
homosexuals, holy men, all create languages that tell the world what they see, feel and
undergo; so it is not the special privilege of the writer to articulate experience or to create
languages to express them.

Basheer’s novels, Balyakalasakhi (Childhood Friend, 1944), Ntuppuppakkoranendaarnnu (My

Granddad Had an Elephant, 1951) and Pathummayude Adu ( Pathumma’s Goat, 1959)
have been especially noted for their colourful and authentic delineation of Muslim life in
Kerala, especially in Malabar. ‘The Childhood Friend’ deals with the passionate and tragic
love affair between Majeed and Suhra .There is no villain in the love story; if there is one,
it is the poverty of Suhra’s father, a small areca nut merchant. Basheer says of poverty :
“Poverty is a fatal disease. It ruins the body, heart and soul”. Majeed’s rich father would
not permit his son to marry Suhra. Later he also turns poor by a twist of fortune. But
then Majeed had to find the means to marry off his sisters. Majeed sets off to find a job,
he loses one leg in the process; still he works as a hotel boy driven by the dream of going
back and marrying Suhra. Meanwhile Suhra gets married to a butcher as his second wife;
her husband ill treats her and when Majeed comes home on leave he finds her pale , ugly,
lean with tuberculosis, with sunken cheeks. That would have turned anyone else away from
her; but Majeed still loves her with the same intensity. But he is shattered later when he
receives a letter from his mother that informs him of Suhra’s death. What makes the novel
different is the deep spirituality of the love affair that went beyond the fascination of the
flesh, a love that Kumaran Asan, the great Malayalam poet, would describe as being not
bound to the body. M.P. Paul, the eminent Malayalm critic called the novel a ‘bleeding page
torn from the book of life’. He praised the work for its ‘minute knowledge of the human
heart, its high imagination and its wide experience of the world.’

‘My Grand dad had an Elephant’(1951) is the story of a family steeped in superstition,
one that still boasted of its ancient glory though now it had fallen on bad days. The main

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 9

character in the novel is Nissar Ahmed, a self-made professor, an enlightened human
being who loves Kunjupathumma. Kunjuthachumma, Kunjupathumma’s mother is the
chief woman character ; she is full of vanity, covers herself in gold, sits idly chewing betel
leaves and boasting about the ‘real’ elephant her father had that had killed four kaffirs. She
had no education and blindly followed what the local priests told her. On losing a case
the family loses all its wealth; still she remains proud of the past. But Kunjupathumma,
her daughter is free of vanity , gets some education and finally gets married to Nizar.
The mother, at the end of the novel,realises her folly and admits that the elephant her
grandfather had was not a real one, but only a black insect that in Malayalam is called
kuzhiyana (The elephant living in a borough). The novel portrays the conflict between the
old and the new worlds and indirectly asks the Muslim brothers and sisters to wake up to
the call of the new world, give up superstitions and absorb only the best and the positive
in their religion. One sentence spoken by Nizar to Pathumma sums it all up : “ Open the
windows; let light and breeze come in”. And the girl who opens the window is surprised
by the light; she says: ‘Velichathinu enthoru velicham!’ (O, what light to the light!’), a typical
Basheer statement.(Another such statement can be found in Balyakalasakhi. When Majeed
is asked how much is one plus one, he answers, ‘a very big One’ and justifies his answer
pointing to the two streams in the village that make one big river)Even though the novel
deals with Muslim community, Basheer’s message cuts across religions and sects; it is a
call for introsepction , an exhortation for a human renaissance, but done so subtly and
artistically so that the work never sounds like a didactic tract.

While all of Basheer’s works have an autobiographical ring as we have already said,
‘Pathumma’s Goat’(1959) is purely autobiographical. It deals with Basheer’s life after his
wanderings when he had settled down at Thalayolapparambu, near Vaikkom. He was
looking for silence and peace; but what he found was noise and tumult. Relatives, cats, rats,
crows, hens, hawks- it turns into a veritable mad house. And all of them have demands
on Basheer; the worst are the relatives who want money; even the goat feeds on Basheer’s
books, clothes and matches when it does not get enough bananas to eat. Basheer looks
helplessly at the goat devouring his novel Balyakalasakhi (The Childhood Friend)and
wonders whether it would dare eat the explosive story, Sabdangal (Voices) that had created
a furore in Malayalam literature! But the goat swallows the story in two minutes and then
moves on to eat his blanket. He requests the goat whom he addresses as ajasundari, the
bovine beauty, to spare the costly bed sheet and promises to get her all the remaining
copies of his books. Still he loves that goat and is in agony when it is about to give birth; his

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 10

affection for the lamb is boundless. The novel was written while Basheer was languishing
in a mental hospital in Trichur after his bouts of insanity ; against his usual practice, he
did not shorten or edit its draft. The novel, made up of the most ordinary things of life
and narrated with detached humour is not just a report of events that happen in his home,
but a great and honest human document of our tragi-comic times with its lovelessness,
unease and exploitation. Basheer gets out of the conventional paradigm of good and
evil in this novel. He travels to the elemental in man, equates all the female characters
calling them just ‘pennungal’ (womenfolk) pointing to some primordial feminine essence,
speaks of their special intelligence, expresses desire through the metaphor of eating. He
even asks the question: “Whose food am I?” The author stands somewhere between the
sacrificial beast and the clown and seems at times to identify himself with the goat. The
novel is open-ended, reminding us of the discussion in Italo Calvino’s metanovel, If on a
Winter’s Night, a Traveller where a man asks: ‘Do we require a beginning and an end to all
stories?’In fact the novel deals with the continuity of life and its permanent angst. The
questions he asks here get new philosophical dimensions in Mantrikappoocha (The Magic
Cat,1968)) that he wrote after almost a decade. Here he is building a house. The novel
has a dialogue between Basheer and a roaming ascetic, which is like Basheer’s own inner
dialogue . If ‘Pathumma’s Goat’ ends in questions, ‘The Magic Cat’ ends in the prayer: Om
Shanti:, shanti, Loka samasta sukhino bhavantu. Mangalam. Both the novels belong more to an
oral than a written tradition. This assertion of orature over literature is a regular posture
in Basheer’s fictional world .

P. Udayakumar in his study on Basheer’s stories, ‘The Ethics of Witnessing’ points out how
the site of his stories is remembrance, ‘a breeze that blows across time from its almost
invisible, other bank. He quotes the beginning of Basheer’s famous story Mathilukal:(Walls):
“ Have you ever heard of a lovestory called ‘The Walls’? I don’t think I have narrated it
before. I thought I would call it ‘Feminine Fragrance’ or ‘The Scent of a Woman’ or
something like that. Now I am going to tell you that story. Listen carefully. It is very
old. Sometimes we say ‘time’. It is from the other bank of that great ‘time’… Remember
that I am on this side now, on this bank of time. A lonely heart. A sad song reaching its
grand stores. This story is that.” Life has been lived out, but bits remain in memory as
stories, and these stories need to be told in the present in terms of a performance. The
Basheer text, the critic says, is always the locus of a remembrance and a performance. “In

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 11

Basheer the text has an indicative, asymptotic status where it reaches out to an actantial
dimension which cannot be contained or understood in terms of a semiology of texts”,
hence Udayakumar prefers to call Basheer’s works ‘literary acts’ rather than ‘texts’. In
Basheer’s early writings, he observes, narrators inhabit and speak from the outskirts of the
mainstream historiography and offer corrections to the apparent patterns of intelligibility
in the realm of the historical if not actually contradict them. But along with this historian
there is also his shadow-counterpart, the autobiographer, so evident in tales like Mathilukal
(The Walls). Basheer himself says: “Anyone can write the kind of stories I have written
without much difficulty. In each person’s life there are lots of things one can write
about. One merely needs to remember them and write”. The autobiographical subject in
Basheer pops up even in his apparently historical narratives like the series where he uses
an imaginary topos he calls sthalam (place) like Muccheettukalikkarante Makal, (The Card-
sharper’s Daughter), Sthalathe Pradhana Divyan (The Chief Godman of the Place) and
Ettukali Mammoonju (Mammoonju, the Spider). The narrator’ s gaze always colours the scene
, and there is a first-person ever lurking even beneath his third-person narratives. He is a
witness who also testifies to the truth of the witnessed event : so he is no passive observer,
but one who has passed through an ethical moment of self-recognition. The testimonial
voice appears in many of Basheer’s works: Kunjupathumma in Ntuppuppakkoranendrannu
( My Granddad had an Elephant) says: “I cannot bear false testimony”. In Sabdangal
(Voices) the soldier who has been discharged is a testimonial voice addressing a writer
who records thet testimony to produce the narrative we read. In his childhood stories
Basheer , his brother Abdul Khader and the neighbour Nathu Damu play out games of
contradictory testimonies, contesting versions of truth and falsehood linked to rewards
and punishments. Handcuffs, scars on the body, all become markers of testimony. Basheer
uses the isolated detail of the partial object in his early texts to overturn the apparent
consolations of macrohistorical narratives while in the sthalam stories the real gets de-
realised through a procedure of comic aggrandizement that turns it into the mock-real,
thus transforming the historical into the diminutive and the comic. These stories parody
historical narration to demonstrate the inadequacy of the polity as a site of foundational
meanings. In Mathilukal(Walls) the scent of the woman that travels across the walls is the
physical, the instinctive, the creaturely asserting itself over the political represented by the
jail. Basheer builds a bridge between the human and the prehuman through the application
of the olfactory sense; desire now finds a discourse beyond the language of individuation
and interiority.

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 12

Mathilukal (Walls) is easily one of Basheer’s finest stories of prison life though he has
others in that background. It is also the basis of a rare film by Adoor Gopalakrishnan.
Here is a man, Basheer himself, taken prisoner; he has been there so many times that
now he is just a number. The story at one level can be read as a criticism of our prison
system with its corruption and discrimination among the prisoners. But the central theme
is Desire. One day our prisoner hears the laughter of a woman from behind the huge wall.
Her scent fills him with desire. It was from the women’s ward. Another day he hears her
whistling .They strike up a conversation .Gradually they get acquainted with each other.
Her name is Narayani. They give descriptions of themselves so that they could visualise
each other. She starts throwing twigs in the air to let him know she is there beyond the
wall. He prepares a rose garden on his side of the wall. They also exchange gifts, throwing
them over the wall. Once a prisoner had made a hole in the wall, but the warders had
found it out and closed it. The two now decide to meet in the hospital, the following
Thursday. They give each other their marks of identification: she had a black mole on
her right cheek and he was a little bald and would carry a red rose in his hand. But that
Wednesday, Basheer gets the release order. His first reaction is, “But who wants freedom?”
As he goes out he sees a dry twig rising in the air. He can only pray for Narayani. The
story is replete with the contrast between spaces inside and outside, the fragmented space
within the walls and the expanse beyond, symbolising freedom; but by a reversal of logic,
the prison becomes the free space illumined by the woman’s fragrance, the flower flung
into the air , the tempting laughter and the snatches of conversation choking with passion.
At the end of the story, the protagonist finds it difficult to move into the ‘ordinary’ space
of freedom. The oppressive determination of the polis in jail, as Udayakumar says, is
suddenly lifted and a new dimension of creatureliness becomes visible when he inhales
the voluptuous smell of a woman and hears her alluring laughter. Thus Basheer restores
to desire a discourse that goes beyond the language of individuation and interiority, to the
very threshold of the species. This dimension can also be seen in other stories of love like
Anuragathinte Dinangal(The Days of Romance) where the temporal and spatial dimensions
dissolve and reach back to a primal space and a primal, eternal, time: “ Long ago, as if
eons ago, in an age perfumed with love, there took place an old little love story which I
am going to tell”.

Sabdangal, a novella that Basheer as well as the critic A. Balakrishna Pillai prefer to call a
long story, published in 1947 is a short masterpiece. The narrator is Basheer himself who
says that he has no philosophy, only some experiences to narrate.The protagonist is a 29-

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 13

year- old soldier , a victim of gonorrhea. He is a solitary and alienated soul, in search of
his unknown parents. He represents Man abandoned alone in the infinity of space He
wants to love everyone, but is thrown into the battle field where the rule is to kill: “And
I killed, so that a few vile despicable creatures could rule over the country. I am referring
to the leaders the world over. Not one of them was on the battlefield, nor their kith and
kin. People armed with lethal weapons destroyed one another. A people’s war indeed!
Which people, may I ask you?” He feels all rulers are murderers and all estates are soaked
in human blood. He does not believe in any particular religion and he does not know what
religion he was born into as he was an orphan picked up from the streets by a poojari, a
temple priest. To the soldier’s question, ‘Does God exist?’ the author’s reply is: ‘Yes, if you
want Him to exist’. That is his reply at 34. The soldier recalls the horrors of the battlefield
including his killing a half-dead, bleeding friend in pain, on his request. He also speaks
frankly about the prostitutes who are the sweet hearts of the soldiers. The dialogue throws
up a host of questions, about honesty in relationships, religious beliefs, morality, the future
of mankind, the past. The soldier speaks also about his initiation into homosexuality by a
eunuch that gave him the dreaded disease. There are frank descriptions of fornication too
in the story and plenty of taboo words which gave a shock to the prudish readers of that
time. The soldier attempts suicide and fails. The whole story, told in fragments and voices,
is structurally modern and deeply moving making us think about the absurd in existence.
Like many Basheer stories, this too ends in a crisis without a resolution.

Basheer had been deeply influenced by Sufi thinking that appears directly in some of
his stories like ‘Anal Huq’. He recreates the legend of Manzoor- al- Hallaj, the Sufi saint
hunted down by the Muslim orthodoxy for having claimed that he is the Truth- a statement
Basheer compares to the Upanishadic ‘Aham Brahmasmi’. The story is told with great
passion and a loathing of the priestly hierarchy. Basheer upholds Al Hallaj’s exploration
of the self and justifies his statement since it might have only meant that all, creatures of
God contain the spark of divinity and truth.(even though in a footnote written in 1982
to this story of 1946, Basheer thinks it is presumptuous on the part of a man who is only
one of God’s creations, to claim that he is Truth /God. The circumstance of this note is
not known; it seems to have been written under some pressure since Basheer ends the note
with the words, ‘Anal Huq’.)Al Hallaj is tried for a transgression of the shariat, but remains
calm and totally fearless. The ulemas want his blood, but the Sultan Muktabirbilla refuses
to sign the fatwa.Hazrat Junayid also first refuses to authenticate it, but he is put under
great pressure until he reluctantly signs it, casting off his ascetic’s robe and donning the

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 14

lawmaker’s . He declares, “In accordance with the social law, Manzoor is liable to receive a
death penalty. But if it is on the basis of truth, only God can decide”. Still Manzoor goes
on repeating ‘Anal Huq’. Blows rain on him, stones whizz through the air looking for the
sinner, his limbs are chopped off and also his tongue, before which he prays to God for
the happiness of his tormentors.The irate mob, according to the legend, burns the hacks
body and casts the ashes into the Euphrates. “And then, still, silent, nature witnessed the
waters of the peaceful river suddenly turn bloody and violent. The waters swelled and
surged like a furious ocean. Thundering, they roared, ‘Anal Huq.’’ The short story, that is
more of a poem than a story, Anarghanimisham (The Invaluable Moment) written in the
same year as ‘Anal Huq’ is also deeply philosophical. The author confronts the ultimate
loneliness here. He speaks of the rumbling notes of sadness behind his laughter. “I am
that invaluable moment caught between two planes of existence: the past standing on the
threshold of the present, and today which is going to merge completely into yesterday..
with the countless yugas…the chaturyugas…the eternal, the infinite… the never-ending
yesterday. I bid farewell. It is all over. No, it is not going to be over. From the next moment
onwards I will be part of all those countless yesterdays cast into oblivion.”

Poovan Pazham ( The Poovan banana), another of his well-known stories is also a story of
love. Abdul Khader saheb, the rowdy of the town, footballer and trade union leader, falls
in love with Jameela Bevi, the cynosure of the town to marry whom VIPs are in queue.
He does not know the niceties of romance; he just stops her on the way one day, asks her
name and introduces himself as the leader of the trade union in her father’s beedi factory
and tells her that he can have the factory closed down; then he declares his love for her.
She likes him, but would not admit it and laughs at him asking, ‘What other news in the
town?’ But Abdul Khader only grows more passionate: ‘I love every inch of you, love
your clothes, even the road you walk’. She asks whether he makes that declamation before
all the girls in the town to which Khader replies she is the only woman in his life. The
love affair raises a storm in the town, Jameela’s father is up in arms against it; but finally
they do get married. The ‘lady’ tries hard to tame him and turn him away from the bad
company of ‘beggars, poets, workers’ etc. He too acts a gentleman for some time and even
cooks for her as she does not seem to know cooking. One day Jameela asks him to bring
her two poovan bananas. Khader is happy that she had not asked for a car or a gold chain or
a dakota airplane or an ice cube from the Everest or two bristles from the freshly-littered
lioness. But once he sets out for the bananas he finds that they are not available this side
of the river. He crosses over; it is raining cats and dogs, the river is in spate and poovan

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 15

bananas are not available on the other shore either. He then buys some oranges; but by
the time the rain stops it is too late to cross over; no boat is available; he grows anxious as
Jameela is alone at home and decides to swim across the flooded river in the dark, holding
the oranges in his turban. He somehow reaches home; but Jameela does not appreciate
the oranges nor believe the tale of his adventure. But now Khader decides to reappear in
his rowdy incarnation and not only makes her eat the oranges but to agree that they are
bananas. He also makes her agree he could keep his old company and she would cook for
him. The story ends when both grow old and have nine children. The town has changed
beyond recognition, but Khader still taunts her reminding her of that fatal day. He asks
her, what he had brought for her from across the river; she answers, ‘Poovan bananas’. And
how did they look? ‘Round like oranges!’

Basheer’s sense of irony works also in the story Vidtikalude Swargam (The Fools’ Paradise)
where the hero is attracted to a woman who one day invites him to her house. He finds the
situation deplorable; she has two pale kids and old and ailing parents. Her terrible plight
kills his desire; he gives her whatever money he had and comes back disillusioned.In the
story, Nairasyam ( Despair), a person who grows from a beggar to a leader dies with one
despair: his beloved had refused water to him when he was thirsty and told him her house
was no orphanage’ She was later ready to offer him anything; but that memory haunts him.
The listener in the story asks the narrator at the end, ‘Any moral?’. He simply says, ‘No, it
was just a memory.’ In Kallanottu ( The Fake Notes), a mother sells her daughter only to
get some fake currency notes and she ends up being raped and killed near the army camp.
Gopinathan in Second-hand marries a woman who had been in love with a poet and had a
child in him’ He thinks she hates him, but finds out in the end that she simply adores him.
InOru Jayilpulliyude Chitram( The Portrait of a Prisoner), one of Basheer’s several prison
stories, Mariamma is in love with a political prisoner and exchanges letters with him. The
story exposes the corruption in our jails. The prisoner advises her not to love him as he
does not hope to come out at all, and he no more looks like his photo she had seen at his
home. In Poleesukarante Makal ( The Daughter of a Policeman), Bhargavi, the daughter
of a policeman falls in love with Jagdeesh, a prisoner her father is after. The writer being
interviewed in Yuddham Avasanikkanamenkil ( If Wars Should End) tells the interviewer
that there will be no wars when leaders, lawyers, judges, policemen, teachers, journalists
and soldiers will all be afflicted with scabies so that they will have time only to scratch.

This irony is evident also in the question-answer column he had done for the cartoon

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 16

weekly, Narmada for some time. It was called Nerum Nunayum ( Truth and Falsehood. )
One questioner asks him whether communists can be called chameleons. Basheer replies,
he has to ask the chameleons to find out if they agree. Asked what changes he finds in
his town, Ernakulam, to which he has returned from Chennai after years, he says he finds
the town now boasts of a mental hospital. He explains the reason too. All the porters,
carters, cooks and hotel managers in the town- who all freely helped him when he came,
had turned editors of weeklies. They had helped him as they all wanted his stories. The
subscribers of these weeklies go mad after reading them regularly for three months. That
explains the presence of the crowded mental hospital there. Another question is whether
Joseph Mundassery, the critic–turned education minister o Kerala, is a Muslim. Basheer
replies that he is; his original name was Yusuf Mumtas Ali and he was a follower of
Mohammed Ali Jinnah. He had been forcibly converted to Christianity by the Roman
catholics led by Fr. Vadakkan (a priest who had played a role in Kerala politics at one time).
Later Joseph Mundassery was sent to China by the communist leaders, K. Damodaran and
A K G; then he became an admirer of China, wrote a book glorifying China’s progress
and became Munda-tse- Tung.

Basheer is also the narrator of the supernatural which in his world is associated with
moonlight. Poonilavil ( In the Light of the Full-Moon ) tells the story of a traveler visiting
the ruins of an old city. The horses drawing the cart stop on the way as if they had seen
something scarily odd and on the way to the bazaar at night he meets a beautiful woman
in white from whom he drinks water. On the way back she invites him to her house: he
finds the sky is the roof of the house and when he hugs her he sees to his horror that
it was a skeleton turning to dust. In Nilavu Kanumpol (While Seeing the Moonlight), the
protagonist who is an editor and a member of a terrorist outfit fighting the British meets
his friends on the seashore who leave him by two in the morning. When he sits alone, he
sees a beautiful woman bathing in the nude in the sea. He turns to go back; but his bicycle
would not move. Finally he carries it on his shoulder; some sand falls on his body and he
finds a a whole group of women bathing, ululating in the sea. In Neelavelicham ( The Blue
Light)on which the film Bhargaveenilayam was later based, the hero rents a house that is said
to be haunted by the ghost of a woman, jilted in love, who had jumped into the well and
killed herself. The writer develops an intimacy with her even while not seeing her, he even
plays music records for her. One day while coming back from a friend borrowing some
kerosene for the lamp that had gone dim, he finds a blue light filling the room. Basheer
has a knack of narrating such tales in a most natural way, but subtly arousing fear in the

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 17

reader.

Basheer, though often called a humanist was not anthropocentric in his vision. The story,
Bhoomiyude Avakasikal (The Rightful Inheritors of the Earth) is a testament of his ecological
vision. When his wife complains that squirrels and crows are feasting on the ripe jackfruit
on the tree in their new compound while bats and birds are eating up the guavas , the
sapotas and the graft mangoes, he tells her: “ But that’s the beauty of it.God almighty, who
holds the universe together without a single prop, has created a variety of things for His
creatures-fruit, edible roots, grass, grain, flowers, water, air, warmth and light. Don’t you
think we should remind ourselves always that birds, beasts and insects too are entitled to
the produce of the earth?”He asks God’s forgiveness for exterminating the rats through
treachery; but he does not agree with his wife when she suggests they buy a gun to shoot
down the bats that destroy the tender coconuts as also the foxes and polecats. He says:
“Not me. I shall not be a party to it. The gun is a symbol of cruelty. It is the child of sin.
Man should have never invented it.”The story ends with the statement: “Remember the
ancient right that God bequeathed at the auspicious moment of creation- all living beings
are the rightful inheritors of the earth.”

Basheer’s humour springs from his grasp of the paradoxes of existence. He combines
a cartoonist’s eye with a philosopher’s vision in portraying his characters as in
Ntuppuppaakkoranendarnnu (My Grand-dad had an Elephant), Sthalathe Pradhana Divyan
(The Most Important Holy Man of the Place), Mucheettukalikkarante Makal (The Card-
Sharper’s Daughter), Aanavariyum Ponkurisum (Anavari and Ponkurisu- nicknames for
Raman Nair and Thoma), Viswavikhyatamaya Mookku (The World-renowned Nose) and
other stories. Look at the way he portrays his characters: “I shall begin with Ottakkannan
Pokker. As the sobriquet prefixed to the name indicates, he had only one eye. It had been
damaged beyond repair in one of the heroic adventures of his salad days. It was true
that certain intellectuals in the locality surreptitiously referred to him as “that one-eyed
monkey”. But never mind that. When this story begins, he was forty-nine years old. His
complexion could be described as fair. The real colour of his teeth was a well-concealed
secret. The visible colour was a dull red, owing to the fact that Pokker was a voracious
betel-chewer.”(The Card-sharper’s Daughter) Pokker was a card-sharper who cheated at
cards while his friend Mandan Muthapa was a pick-pocket. Basheer treats him as an artist:

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 18

“Contrary to popular opinion , there is nothing demeaning about a pickpocket’s work. It
has made amazing strides in many countries of the world. There are even colleges to train
aspiring pickpockets. That apart, it is a profession that requires unwavering concentration,
infinite patience, an eye for detail and unshaken faith in the adage, ‘silence is golden’…. As
for capital, long nimble fingers and a shawl are the only tools required. Like all committed
artists, a pickpocket has to have a finger on the pulse of the people. Not for him the
solitary existence of the ivory tower. In other words, a pickpocket is essentially a social
being, sharing the joys and sorrows of people.”Pokker’s daughter Zainaba falls in love
with Muthapa much to the chagrin of Pokker. The village is divided over the issue. On
Zainaba’s request Muthapa stops pickpocketing and starts a tea-stall with the money he
makes from card-sharping helped secretly by Zainaba. The wedding finally takes place as
Pokker could not go against his daughter’s wishes as of his other friends though he is not
happy about it. The tea-stall soon grows nto a proper hotel. Pokker is amazed to know it
was Zainaba who had revealed the secret of his card-sharping to Muthapa.

Another portrait: “Ettukali Mammoonju was called so because he looked like a spider, an
ettukali. Short-statured, with a small head, the one endowment he could boast of was his
moustache. He let it hang a foot-long on either side. There was a general complaint that he
would let his appendage rub against the women he passed by. People said he was impotent,
a secret that the women of the neighbourhood too knew. How they knew about this, nobody
could tell.”(Ettukali Mammoonju) Mammoonju wanted to participate in the experiences
and adventures of the notorious rogues, Anavari Raman Nair(Raman Nair, the Elephant-
Grabber) and Ponkurisu Thoma (The Thoma of the Golden Cross) and was unhappy that
he was never considered important enough to be accepted in the distinguished company.
So one day Mammoonju told them a secret: that he was responsible for the pregnancy of
Thachi, the servant maid of Undakkannan Andru ,(Andru, the Round-eyed) the notorious
miser. This earns Mammoonju a lot of respect and even gifts from friends. But it is soon
proved that it was only a tumour that had to be surgically removed; yet Mammoonju does
not withdraw his claim; now he says Andru got Thachi aborted. Finally Andru , already
married to Khadijumma to avoid paying a servant, takes Thachi also for another wife.
Even then Mammoonju tells his people: “That round-eyed bastard destroyed my son first;
now he has married my wedded wife, Thachi!”

And here is Mookken, the illiterate cook who grew famous overnight as his nose began
to grow like the elephant’s trunk: “Mookken’s nose started growing all of a sudden-it

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 19

extended past his mouth and down his chin in no time. Within a month its tip was level
with his navel…Perhaps there was nothing unusual about it. The occurrence of such
noses has been recorded in history.”(The World-renowned Nose) He lost his job due to
this abnormality, but soon found fortune as visitors thronged to see his nose: He became
a millionaire; acted in films, six poets wrote encomiums on him, nine biographies were
published, he began to comment on international events, his two secretaries fell in love
with him; the government conferred a title on him, political parties vied with each other to
get him as a member, there was propaganda that his nose was made of rubber which was
disproved, he became an MP and was conferred an honorary doctorate.

Basheer has contributed several usages to Malayalam: meaningless expresions like ‘huttina
halitta luthappee’( something like ‘humpty-dumpty’), or ‘Kukruma dharma’( in the context
meaning some evil doing), romamatangal ( ‘hair-religions’, pointing to the importance hair
has in various religions and rituals), ‘cock-pecked’ ( as the antonym of ‘hen-pecked’), ‘he-
cow’ ( for ox), ‘selfichi’ ( feminine for the Self) and Sinkidimungan ( a hefty person), not to
speak of the compound adjectives he uses for women, God and the universe.

Basheer was one with the ‘progressive’ writers in empathising with the hapless and in
upholding hope in man and the possibility of change, but he went beyond them while
looking at the human condition in its many hues and dimensions, including the spiritual that
remains an unstated undercurrent in his narratives of life. He belonged to a generation
fed on rigid ideologies and arid experiences, but he picked up his tales from the throbbing
warmth of life’s poetry. During about half-a century of his creative career, he published
only thirty books from Balyakalasakhi (1944) to Sinkidimungan (1991) but every one of
these 2,200 pages was world class literature. He created his own language within language,
(having abandoned English in which he had attempted his first novel) polished, edited
and re-edited each line he wrote until it shone like crystal: clear, sparkling, many-faced.
Basheer was a modernist who perhaps never knew he was one. He broke new grounds
quite casually and unselfconsciously, just by recounting his varied experiences of the world
in his own crisp and inimitable style. He shunned the big canvas; what mattered to him
was the sheer depth and intensity of the narrated event. He hated none; thieves, gamblers,
homosexuals, pimps, prostitutes: everyone had a seat in Basheer’s heaven. The fallen, he
knew, were the victims of unkind circumstances. They are also the chosen in his world
illuminated by the beams of a sacred love from the other side of material life.

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 20

Critics have compared Kafka’s ‘Hunger Artist’ with Basheer’s Janmadinam (The Birth day)
as also Jimenez’s ‘Platero and I’ with Basheer’s Pathummayude Adu (Pathumma’s Goat)
in an attempt to prove he is both modern and universal. But Basheer’s modernism and
his trans-national humanism came from his intense rootedness in the soil of his land
and community and the hells and heavens he came across in his gipsy-like wanderings.
Basheer, while having ardent admirers like M. T. Vasudevan Nair, M. N. Vijayan and M.
A. Rahman who has done a beautiful documentary on him, was not without detractors
either: they stamped his Sabdangal (Voices) and Pavappettavarude Vesya ( The Prostitute of
the Disposessed) obscene; they objected to his Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu being made a text
book; one even went to the extent of publishing a book to prove the whole Basheeriana
trite and insignificant. Basheer met all of them with his Sufi detachment and refused to
immortalise them by not taking up the gauntlets.

Basheer has a story based on an experience he once had in a frontier province. He had
his lunch in a restaurant and found his wallet missing while preparing to pay .The shop
owner had him stripped and would have gone further had a man not suddenly emerged
offering to pay the bill for Basheer.T he man showed Basheer several wallets and asked
him to pick up his - he was a pick-pocket. Here is the source of Basheer’s unflinching
faith in man’s basic goodness. While a prisoner, Basheer used to cultivate roses on the jail
courtyard. This dispassionate activity of generating fragrance for the unfortunate trapped
in their dark destinies is symbolic of his whole oeuvre, his great human - he would say
divine-mission.

VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER and Indian Literature:• 21